Intralingual live subtitling in EMI lectures in Flanders: Students’ perceptions and performance

Yanou Van Gauwbergen, Isabelle S. Robert & Iris Schrijver

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Title
Intralingual live subtitling in EMI lectures in Flanders: Students’ perceptions and performance

Abstract
Many universities are considering using English as a means of instruction (EMI), but students’ limited proficiency in English could be a serious drawback. Live subtitling might help to overcome this language barrier. The aim of this article is to report on (1) how university students in Flanders perceive EMI lectures accompanied by intralingual live subtitles; and (2) whether these subtitles influence their performance. In this study, the impact of subtitling on students’ perceptions and performance was investigated during six two-hour Research Skills lectures taught in English to students of Applied Linguistics who have Dutch as their mother tongue. The live subtitling was alternately produced through respeaking and through automatic speech recognition (ASR). The data were collected using (1) tests after each lecture about their perceptions and the content of the lecture (performance); (2) an online questionnaire about the students’ demographics (e.g., mother-tongue and self-reported proficiency in English); and (3) online language tests, which consisted of a listening test and a vocabulary test. The results show that the impact of subtitles on students does not align with the findings of earlier research, as students’ performance with subtitles was lower. This has implications for the possible implementation of live subtitling in education.

Keywords
Intralingual live subtitling, EMI, respeaking, ASR

DOI 10.17462/para.2025.02.09

Issue 37(2) of Parallèles

Yanou Van Gauwbergen

Yanou Van Gauwbergen

Passionate about languages and cultures, Yanou Van Gauwbergen pursued a bachelor’s degree in Applied Linguistics at the University of Antwerp, starting in 2016, studying Dutch, French and Spanish. After graduating cum laude in 2019, he later obtained a master’s in Translation and a master’s in Interpreting, from which he graduated magna cum laude both times in 2020 and 2021 respectively. Before starting his PhD in Media Accessibility at his alma mater, he gained professional experience as a respeaker at the Flemish private broadcaster VTM, providing (live) SDH subtitles for the news. This allowed him to empathize closely with the research project he completed as a PhD, investigating the eﬀect of intralingual live subtitling on perception, performance, and cognitive load in an EMI university lecture.

Isabelle S. Robert

Isabelle S. Robert

Isabelle S. Robert is professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics, Translation and Interpreting at the University of Antwerp (Belgium), where she teaches undergraduate courses on French oral and written text production and in Translation Studies, and graduate courses on Dutch–French translation, revision and translation technology. Her main research interests include translation process research, audiovisual translation (interlingual live subtitling), translation revision (processes), sight translation and multimodal simultaneous interpreting.

Iris Schrijver

Iris Schrijver

Iris Schrijver is Associate Professor at the Department of Applied Linguistics/Translation & Interpreting Studies at the University of Antwerp, where she teaches undergraduate and graduate courses on Spanish-Dutch translation and Translation Studies. She is specialized in cognitive translation and writing process research, translation and revision competence acquisition, and interlingual (live) subtitling.